


Where Bodies Are Mounted

by Razzaroo



Category: Black Cat (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24706915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razzaroo/pseuds/Razzaroo
Summary: Jenos Hazard is a repository of hidden things.
Relationships: Baldorias "Baldor" S. Fanghini/Jenos Hazard
Kudos: 3





	Where Bodies Are Mounted

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, my name is Razzaroo and I'm a pretentious kneecap who thought that this fandom needed more of whatever this is rather than, like, anything about the actual main characters

Jenos spends too much of his free time accumulating secrets. They’re not something he seeks out, but they’re what people offer him, like some kind of tribute; he stores them away, pierced through with thorns so that when the owners come back for them, he still holds a trace of them. They run the gamut from the small and light, like how Shao Lee really is human enough to feel proper emotions, to the large and weary, like how Nizer has brushed up against death enough times to fear it. He builds a forest of thorns around himself, around his own secrets, and people don’t ask anymore; he always lies anyway.

But then there is Baldor, both an open book and a locked chest, a wide field and a brick wall thrown up so suddenly it could break a nose if someone wasn’t looking out for it. Jenos circles him, a buzzard cautious of landing, and Baldor slowly opens, a thicket opened up by time and rot. Jenos wraps Baldor up in himself, binds him up in his limbs, and draws out what dregs of humanity he can.

In the neutral white light of a hotel room, Jenos presses his thumb against a scar on Baldor’s side, “This one?”

Baldor huffs, “Do you need to know everything?”

“You owe me answers to some things.” Jenos leans over him, catches the knife-sharp glare, “I saved your life, remember?”

“For all it’s worth,” Baldor mutters and Jenos stores it away, small stash to remember: Baldor does not think he is worth much. Still, he indulges, “Someone tried to blow me up. Is that good enough for you?”

Could be. Maybe. Jenos won’t dig any further, for fear of the mine collapsing above his head, the way forward closed off forever. Baldor lets him settle like dust, like a shroud, one ear pressed over a heartbeat that atrophies without the proper attention. Jenos says nothing when arms close around him, grip bruising because Baldor has never been taught to want something gently.

* * *

There are very few people that Jenos lets in close. Despite his number, he’s an unlucky charm: he wishes that his tally of living friends was higher than that of his dead ones; his family was a write off from the start.

But there is Nizer, who has somehow managed to lose more than Jenos has, who’s no longer content to let go of his friends easily. He cuts his hands trying to keep Jenos close and something dark curdles his expression when Baldor’s name comes up. Jenos sits at the table in their shared kitchen, trying to scrape his thoughts into some pretence of coherency, and digs his nail into the wood.

“You’re making that face again,” he says, and Nizer scoffs.

“You’re making bad decisions again.”

“When have I ever made a good one?”

Nizer has to concede the point, being one of the few privy to some of Jenos’s personal history. Still, Jenos appreciates his interest, his care. Nizer’s older and has seen a different face of the world and there’s value in that, in letting him be somewhere safe to fall. He still thinks Jenos has virtues to count and Jenos appreciates _that_ more than he can say.

“Nizer?”

“What?”

“You know you’re too good for me.”

Nizer rolls his eyes but he messes Jenos’s hair anyway, rakes a hand through it on the way to the balcony. Jenos stays where he is but he hears the click of a lighter, hears the small flare of flame, and wishes that he and Nizer shared the same vices.

* * *

After years working for Chronos, Jenos knows what he is to everyone under its roof. To the erasers, the rank and file, he’s one of the dreaded Numbers, only appearing when they’ve made a mistake. He cleans up and he retrieves runaways in the nameless, faceless way of all Numbers.

Among the Numbers, he’s the one who doesn’t quite fit right. His attitude is wrong; his loyalties lie at the wrong feet; he has no story to ground him in reality, to indicate the road he took to get where he is. He grew out of the ground and Chronos built itself around him. He wishes it were that simple.

“You can ask,” he says, when Baldor mentions the mark on his shoulder, faded now but clearly a shadow of something painful, “Everyone does.”

“And no one gets an answer,” Baldor says, “Or at least, never an honest one.”

“Mystery’s part of my charm.”

“Is it?”

Jenos almost bristles, “Worked on you, didn’t it?”

Baldor’s smile is wry, “Don’t overestimate yourself, Jenos.”

“You’re still here.”

“And I can leave.”

Jenos grins, “Bet you don’t get to say that often.”

It’s no secret that Baldor is a man with very few options in his life. He didn’t choose his work; he didn’t choose his training; he didn’t even choose Kranz, though Jenos is certain they were really made for each other. But he chooses Jenos, time and again, for his own reasons. He says nothing when Jenos leans against him, and Jenos considers it a success to be allowed this close, to be allowed to anchor his paper-thin self against someone with such solid history. He uses Baldor to fill in his own blanks, to shield the parts of him that would crumble if exposed to the sun.

* * *

“How did you join Chronos?”

The question comes in the middle of the night. He circles the scar on Jenos’s shoulder and clearly has suspicions.

“Why do you want to know?” Jenos asks, “You made it sound like you didn’t care before.”

“You said you wanted honesty. Figured I was due some of the same.”

Baldor’s got him against a wall there. Jenos has been doing more taking than giving, having cracked open Baldor’s shell and exposed his vulnerabilities, picked out the patterns of his habits and unravelled his humanity. Jenos has used him to paper over his own weak spots, a shield against questions into his past because people are instead questioning his present.

“I was fourteen,” he says, “My options weren’t good.”

“Fourteen?”

“We’re not all born for our jobs, Baldorias. Some of us get stuck between bad and worse.” He rolls onto his back, “It’s not a normal person’s life dream.”

“Happy childhoods don’t make Chronos Numbers.”

“You’re admitting you weren’t happy?”

“Or that I was never a child.” Baldor smiles, and that’s never been a pleasant expression, not on his face, “Take your pick.”

There’s a grain of honesty in it and if Jenos was more awake, he’d pull more out and spear it in the place he stores all secrets. Baldor settles himself closer, his face hidden in the crook of Jenos’s shoulder, a vulnerability that he never shows. Jenos puts that away, more for himself than anyone else; if Baldor needs warmth and comfort and closeness, if he is as human as anyone else, then so is Jenos. Pasts aren’t all that makes a man; the present and the future are just as important and possibly even more revealing.

“Is Kranz blessed the same way?” Jenos asks, “No childhood. No beginning. No end. Just now.”

“Kranz and I are very different men. I know the rest of you don’t like to admit it.”

Jenos turns in Baldor’s arms and feels out the shape of his jaw before following the line of his neck, his shoulders. He’s solid as stone, and the eyes that watch Jenos glint in the dark, catching the light of the streetlamp outside the room. He’s very real, and he catches Jenos’s wrist with fingers that are firm as steel.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jenos says.

“Because I’m not the person to ask. You want to know about Kranz, you ask him yourself.”

Ah. Kranz is unknown territory, charted by few and regarded as dangerous by most. Jenos isn’t willing to risk his neck more than he already is with the Elders breathing down the back of it and Baldor’s teeth at his throat.

“I’ll leave it,” he says. He untangles himself from Baldor’s hold but can’t shake the weight of him. It doesn’t rest on his shoulders so much as it’s tied to the thread of the image Jenos has built up of himself and would unravel it all if Jenos isn’t careful.

* * *

The more time they spend together, the more pieces of Baldor accumulate under Jenos’s skin, the more he reveals himself to be more man than monster or machine. He cuts himself shaving, the same place every time; he has nightmares about how Kranz went blind; his parents sold him before he was born, a son exchanged in secret for a fistful of silver. He knows himself, his past and his place, solid and identifiable. As time passes, it becomes clearer that he doesn’t hide who he is; the parts of himself that he flaunts serve to keep people away. If there’s parts of himself he can’t accept or understand, he waits for Chronos to notice and prune them away.

And Chronos always notices.

The Elders order an audience. They don’t _ask,_ because that would leave room for refusal and because the Elders of Chronos don’t _ask_ for anything; if they wanted the world to stop turning, they would expect it to do so on command.

Jenos stands before those three screens, knowing how small he is in this room. Whatever game he and Baldor have been playing, the board has now been sent tumbling to the ground, upended by the Elders who have no time for such things.

“Number VII.” Jenos looks up. The Elders all look the same to him; he knows their names but not which one belongs to which face, “There will be no more contact between you and Number VIII. Understood?”

It’s short and simple. Jenos isn’t surprised that they’d call him here, into the heart of their power where he is rendered powerless, just to tell him this. The same could have been communicated through Sephiria. This is a show of power, their way of saying ‘ _we own you’_ as if Jenos has ever forgotten.

He meets their eyes.

And he lies.

“Understood.”

* * *

His luck comes through.

The Elders don’t punish him for leading Baldor astray. They suspend Baldor from duty, as if he’s been injured rather than just been seen feeling. Jenos isn’t sure what they hope to accomplish but he stays quiet; it won’t serve him to ask.

“You dodged a bullet,” Nizer says. They’re in the space between jobs, the lull in time Chronos gives them before it picks which target needs attention next.

“I know,” Jenos says, “Don’t know if Baldor did.”

“Baldor will survive. He always does.”

Jenos turns the whisky in his glass, “He probably will.”

Nizer looks at him and he wonders, briefly, if he’d sounded too fond. Jenos has dug enough out of Baldor to know that he’ll be back. Survival in the Numbers, both surviving their enemies and surviving Chronos, depends on each other. Baldor’s left pieces of himself in Jenos, small things to remind himself that under Number VIII, he’s vulnerable and mortal in the way all humans are. Jenos, for his part, has buried himself under the dirt of too many somebody elses; the lines between him and Baldor-Nizer-Shao have blurred. He’ll spend his nights holding up memories and asking _is this yours or mine_ until he boils himself down to the bare bones of his past.

Jenos is a repository of hidden things. He can hold on to them and still hold on to _him._

“Nizer,” he says, pushing his glass away.

Nizer considers him, edged with fondness; Jenos has spent a lifetime chasing that. He’d fallen into Chronos’s hand looking for someone who would _need_ him, who could _want_ him.

“Did I ever tell you about my parents?”


End file.
